Boxing Day Shirt

I managed to find some time over the Christmas holidays amidst the food and festivities to return to my Singer for a cute little project. On Boxing Day I happily spent the day in my pyjamas at home coming up with the design for this new top. 

Because I had no plans to leave the condo I rummaged around for random pieces of fabric and notions and rediscovered some green and red binding in my sewing box. I spent a few hours hand-stitching the roses and flower stems on the front and back of this top, then assembled the two halves using the Singer. After trying on the top I decided it looked a bit too boxy for my liking so I added white ribbon all the way around the upper portion to break up the blank space. Next came a few red buttons for detail and red binding to tie up the back. Voila! 

Lost Wax Casting: Koi Cuff Bracelet

In my model-making class last week I started a cuff bracelet which will probably take me into the new year. This project will give me something to do during the Christmas break when we're off for a few weeks. I was inspired by a design I saw online here. Pretty ambitious I know, but hey it's something to strive for.

After sawing out a thick block of wax for the cuff bracelet I used the drill press to take out the middle section. I drilled a series of holes around the inner diameter and then cut through the remaining bits of wax with a regular jewellery's saw frame. Then it was time to file, file, file!

For now I'm keeping the cuff quite thick to provide support until all of the design has been carved into the front.  After that it can be hollowed out from the inside to reduce the cost and weight of casting.

Design for new bracelet

Here is the design I plan to use for the bracelet.  I found a nice stencil for a single koi online so I simply mirrored the image and added some more flowers as filler. I sized the design for my bracelet, printed it, and  taped it to the wax cuff for transfering. Using a pin I transferred most of the design onto the wax, leaving out the more intricate details such as the fish scales and the smaller flowers. This took about an hour.

Design transferred to wax using pin-pricks

It took me about 3 hours with the flex-shaft and a set of burs to create a sunken relief for the blackspace in my bracelet (I was way too timid with the burs). The instructor thought this project would take 40 - 50 hours to complete - so far I've put in 7 hours. I'll have to decide just how much fine detail I want in this bracelet but ultimately the plan is to have it ready for casting in January before my courses end.

Lost Wax Casting: Dragonfly Pendant

For my next pendant project I decided to try a dragonfly and aimed to make it thinner and lighter than the swan.  I started with a 2mm-thick piece of wax and filed it down to 1.7mm.  Then I used needle files to start forming the overall shape of the dragonfly and borrowed a graver from the instructor to do the grooves in between the wings and beads of the body.

Here it is after I finished casting it in sterling silver.  Again the white colour is from the fine silver which  hasn't been polished off yet.  I made a rubber mold of this pendant after soldering on jump rings and polishing it down a bit.  This time it was alot more difficult to cut the two halves apart in the same plane where the pendant was because the dragonfly is much thinner than the previous swan pendant!

I ended up giving this necklace to my friend and then cast one of the blue duplicates for myself.  I tried finishing the pendants with the polishing wheel to get a high-shine coating but was unsuccessful.  Because the pendant is so thin it heated up very quickly with friction.  This softened the metal (making it easy to bend) and meant it was very difficult  to hold onto the pieces for more than a second or two at a time - hot hot hot!  Eventually I settled for using a tiny polishing wheel with my handpiece.  It couldn't do the job as well as a polishing wheel but saved me from getting any more burns on my fingers!

Copper Spoon: Forging Technique (cont'd)

copper blank and brass template

I did it, I managed to saw out the copper blank in just over 40 minutes and I'm proud to say I didn't break a single saw blade. After filing down the edges and annealing the copper I went on to saw out a brass spoon template. This took about 10 - 15 minutes which seemed like a breeze compared to the 3mm thick copper.

Results after initial forging

Next it was time to tackle the forging hammer. Which really meant pounding for a good 20 minutes and then switching to a lighter hammer. My forearms were throbbing at that point and I figured I was better off having to pound harder with a lighter hammer than having my forearms scream at me for the next two hours.


I had a very difficult time forming the copper blank into the shape of the brass template. The goal was to thin out the spoon bowl and top end of the handle, meanwhile shifting the excess copper into the neck of the spoon where it should be thickest. Shifting metal is easier said than done!

Trying to shift metal from the bowl to the neck of spoon

As you can probably make out in the photos the bowl of the spoon is still quite thick so I have a long way to go. We had the option of also making the spoon out of silver, which only one student chose to do. I wasn't quite confident enough to lay down $80 for a silver spoon but unfortunately that means not being able to use this copper spoon once I'm finished.

Copper Spoon: Forging Technique

For our final project we forged a copper spoon out of this 3mm thick piece of copper. After I was thoroughly exhausted from finishing the second copper bowl, I took one look at this thick piece of copper and decided to leave it for the start of the next class. The instructor estimated that using a jeweller's hand saw and size 8 blades it should take us *only* 45 minutes to cut out the initial shape of the spoon. At that point I called it a night.

3mm thick piece of copper - ugh!

Cloisonne Pendant (cont'd)

Progressing slowly on the pendant. For the background I wet-packed two layers of Grass Green for shadowing and then added a layer of Peppermint Green which needs a second or third coating. The butterfly wings have two layers of Rose Pink but the colour isn't as bright as I expected. I also added a layer of Perriwinkle in the tips of the wings but after firing it seems to have blended with the pink. The body has an opaque yellow until I can think of what else to do with it.

Pendant after two layers

Almost done. I wet-packed several more layers into the cloisonne and the colours are becoming more vibrant. The cloisonne was beginning to curve from all of the firings so the instructor helped me flatten the piece by heating it up and then smashing it flat between two heavy metal plates immediately after removing it from the kiln. It didn't seem like a very sophisticated technique but was very effective. I was skeptical that the enamel wouldn't just crack off. In fact, it would have if we had smashed it even 5 seconds later and the piece had cooled down too much. 

After the cloisonne was flat it was easy to stone, which involves scrubbing it under running water with a piece of carborundum (silicon carbide). This removed excess enamel that was covering the cloisonne wire so now the butterfly outline looks like it is glowing. The cloisonne will undergo one last firing to maturity next week.

Agate Pendant

Ok change of plans. I had originally envisioned making some stud earrings for myself but decided at the last minute to make a pendant instead. The instructor cautioned that if I went with studs it would be very easy to break off the earring posts when I went to set the stones. Since you can't apply heat to metal after setting stones, I wouldn't have been able to re-solder the posts back on or do a whole lot with my finished cabochon settings if I had been so unfortunate.

I decided to switch gears and make a pendant using my two settings. If I had planned this properly I would have selected different sized stones, or different stones altogether, just to make it more interesting.  In the end

Here is the agate pendant with the cabochons set. Finishing this piece off proved to be much more frustrating and challenging than I had thought. The truly frustrating part was keeping the pendant fixed using the waxy resin. The problem was that the resin was considerably contaminated from being used in previous classes so it did a very poor job of holding the pieces in place while I set the stones.

After about the twelfth time of it coming loose (and having made little progress on setting the stones) the instructor gave me a pitch pot of which there was only one for the whole class. The tar in the pitch pot was unbelievably  more effective in securing the settings than the resin and I was able to complete my pendant with far less cursing!

Agate Earrings

After finishing up with the silver band ring I started on my final project in the Jewellery I course. We were learning about cabochons and bezel settings for our next ring project but I was leaning towards making a pair of stud earrings instead.  Here are the Botswana Agate cabochons I picked up along Queen street. In this photo I just finished hammering out the walls of the bezel setting using the bezel mandrel.

Copper Bowl II: Raising Technique

In our second project we started with a copper plate of the same diameter that was used for the first bowl. The raising technique compresses the copper and thickens the wall. The shape created above was made by hammering the outside of the bowl against a rounded T-stake (as opposed to hammering the inside of the bowl against a concave groove using the sinking techique). I'm finding that raising the bowl is a much slower and tiring process than sinking.  The technique is generally needed to create certain designs that can not be formed by sinking alone (or so I've been told).



Here is the bowl after another four hours of hammering and annealing. Raising is definitely more tiring than sinking. It's starting to look more like a bowl now.

 


Three final hours of hammering and the bowl is pretty much complete.



 

Here are photos of the two bowls together. The diameter of the first bowl using the sinking technique is 5.25 inches while the diameter of the second bowl using the raising technique is an inch smaller. I thought the difference would be a bit more dramatic but perhaps that's only the case when the instructor does it properly!

Left bowl formed by sinking, right bowl formed by raising

Cloisonne Pendant

Last night I started my cloisonne pendant which involved using tweezers and my fingers to tediously form delicate thin strips of copper into shape and then adhere them to the pendant using Klyr-fire. The piece was then put in the kiln and heated until the copper strips started to sink into the clear flux base coat (but not touching the actual copper base).

This was the largest piece of copper I had which is about 4cm x 4cm. When I drew the butterfly onto paper and shaped the copper strips on top of the sketch I forgot that I had previously drilled holes into the top of the pendant. When I transferred the copper strips to the actual pendant I couldn't find an arrangement that avoided overlapping the wings with either of the holes. Because forming the butterfly shape had been so tedious I decided not to tamper further with the design and will just need to work with what I have.

The next step will be to wet-pack the enamel powder into the different cells (rather than sifting which offers less control). The pendant has to be pickled in between each firing since the copper strips are bare and will develop firescale each time. Since the wire was not bent completely flat you can see some small gaps between the strip and the pendant base in the top right photo. Once I begin to add layers of enamel into the cells the gaps will disappear and the strips will be held much more solidly in place.

Lost Wax Casting: Swan Pendant (cont'd)

My initial plan was to just put the pendant onto a simple string of pearls but after trying on the necklace a few times I decided I didn't like the way it hung. The pendant is quite thick and heavier then it ought to be so it created a sharp 'V' shape to the necklace instead of a nice curvature.

I switched gears and came up with a design that is a bit more elaborate. Due to the weight of the pendant I couldn't make the droops of pearls symmetric but ultimately I still liked the effect.

Briarwood & Ivory

Here are earrings I created using a stencil that was too large for the actual pieces of copper. The base coat transparent Ivory put directly onto the copper. Above it I layered Briarwood for the stencil which ended up being a fairly "hard" colour. I had to do two coats for each piece, being careful to line up the stencil between layers. Then I fired both earrings together side by side to try and get an even distribution of heat. Even so the left earring turned out well but the right earring was about 2-3 seconds underfired so it didn't turn out as smooth as the other. How finicky!

Briarwood & Ivory earrings

 Next I worked on a pendant to go with the earrings. I used sections of the same stencil from the earrings to cover different areas of the pendant and am working through the second coat before putting it through a final firing.

Matching pendant

Copper Bowl I: Sinking Technique

In this Silversmith course we are working exclusively with copper (go figure). At George Brown silversmithing refers to the techniques used in creating larger pieces of silver items such as plates, bowls, spoons, tea sets, etc. These techniques involve primarily different ways of hammering the metal to form it into your chosen design. The types of jewellery formed by this silversmith method are very different from what I had created in my "Silversmith" classes at The Devil's Workshop. I'd actually equate those techniques with George Brown's goldsmithing classes (where so far we are working with brass and silver!). Anyway terminology aside here are some of the projects from my Silversmith course at George Brown.

Creating the initial bowl shape out of a copper disk

In our first project we created a bowl out of a sheet of copper by purely hammering techniques. The method of sinking stretches out the metal and thin the walls. I started by drawing concentric circles on the copper plate and hammering the bowl over a small concave groove (much smaller in diameter than the bowl) to slowly bring up the sides of the bowl. In between hammering I had to frequently anneal the copper because it hardened with every blow.

Checking the shape against my template

  After achieving the general shape I created a template of the bowl by tracing out half of the circumference at the mouth and used that to guide how deep the bowl would become. The goal was to create a hemisphere. In the second week I worked from the outside of the bowl (you can see the grid marks I drew in the photo below) and used a hammer to shape the bowl against a convex stake. This technique finishes both the inside and outside surfaces of the bowl simultaneously while shaping the bowl to the template.

Almost there, I'd say

The bowl will be marked against it's template to see how close it is to a perfect hemisphere. After marking we will be free to change the design of the bowl by cutting an interesting edge out of the top, hammering designs into the walls of the bowl, or creating feet at the bottom for the bowl to stand on. There were some pretty cool designs on display in the classroom so I'll take a closer look next time.

Lost Wax Casting: Swan Pendant (cont'd)

I learned how to make my first rubber mold in class which more or less followed the process described here. There were a few slight differences; The silicon rubber I used was heated to 305degF for 49 minutes (seven minutes per layer), and instead of using a mold cutting frame I just had the scalpel and hook. We were also taught to cut the two halves apart with an uneven edge to ensure a better fit when the two halves were put back together - sort of like keying the two sides.

 The best part about the rubber mold is that it picked up the thin jump rings I soldered on which hopefully means for my next swan pendant casting I won't have to solder new ones.  It had been tricky soldering the jump rings to the pendant without melting them since the pendant has so much more thermal mass and took longer to heat up.

Last night I also soldered a thin piece of wire into a tiny hole in the pendant that was drilled with a 0.8mm bur. The pearl I'm going to add is 6mm in diameter and fits nicely onto the pin. I'll need to pick up some glue to secure it in place and then the only thing left is to attach a string of pearls or silver chain.

Abstract Cherry Blossom

Last night I worked on a pendant which didn't quite turn out as planned. I used white in my third layer to make some tree branches and then sifted about 4 different layers of pink, purple, and cream to try and produce something resembling a cherry blossom. It was all going fairly well until the very last firing where I was trying to get all layers to maturity so that the surface would be generally smooth and shiny. Because the previous seven firings had been successful I was surprised when I opened the kiln door and saw that the white enamel had been overfired and basically bled outwards.

It turns out that the white enamel that we got in our kits is a pretty hard enamel/colour and should only be used as the base coat and not for subsequent layers. Apparently I should have used what's called "foundation white" if I wanted to use white in a non-base layer (not very intuitive from the name). That would have been a softer enamel and wouldn't have required firing for so long. I ended up trying to add a few more layers of pink and green to cover up some of the white that had bled to the sides and that's where I left it at the end of the night. Not quite the way I wanted but not bad for a first design. I should call it "Abstract Cherry Blossom".